Phil Windley's Technometria | Tag: programming languages
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Anti-Perl Social Engineering
Dave Cross has a piece on why corporations hate Perl. He's being a little hyperbolic (as he admits)--not everyone hates Perl, but he's right in noting that there is a backlash against it. He says: I was talking to... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 20, 2008 11:13 AM
Transactional Memory
We all know that Intel and AMD have punted. They can't keep building larger, faster chips for a variety of technical and economic reasons, so they have started placing multiple cores on a single chip. This, in theory, maintains... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 28, 2008 9:29 AM
Tyler Close: Using Promises to Orchestrate Web Interactions
Tyler Close answers questions after his talk(click to enlarge) Tyler Close of Waterken fame presented a way of using promises to produce succinct JavaScript (and Java) code for doing multiple asynchronous requests with a Web server. The idea of... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 25, 2008 1:43 AM
Can Your Programming Language Do MapReduce?
Joel Spolsky has a great, understandable description of what MapReduce is and why you might care. He also speaks to the benefit of learning functional programming, even if your first job interviewer isn't going to ask you "Have you... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 7, 2008 3:50 PM
John McCarthy on the Elephant Programming Language
John McCarthy(click to enlarge) He wasn't on the program, but this morning's keynote was given by Professor John McCarthy--the inventor of LISP and coiner of the term "artificial intelligence." This morning, he's talking about Elephant 2000, a programming language... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 5, 2008 10:28 AM
Fran Allen: Compilers and Parallel Computing Systems
Fran Allen delivers Organick Lecture(click to enlarge) Fran Allen was the Turing Award winner for 2006. This afternoon she's giving the University of Utah's Organick Memorial Lecture. I've reported on some of these in the past few years: Jim... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 21, 2008 4:55 PM
On Static Types and Language Choice
I caught a little flack in response to my post calling attention to Steve Yegge's recent essay "Portrait of a Noob." In particular Levi thought I was out of line for endorsing something so inflammatory: "People who approach programming... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 12, 2008 8:46 AM
Arc Is Released
Paul Graham has released Arc, his new language. Arc is still a work in progress. We've done little more than take a snapshot of the code and put it online. I spent a fews days cleaning up inconsistencies, but... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 30, 2008 4:40 PM
The IO Programming Language
One of my students, Duane Johnson, asked me this morning if I'd heard of the IO programming language. I hadn't. Looking around, it looks like a fun little language. IO is a "pure" object oriented programming language with a... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 5:10 PM
Is Intuitive Always Good?
Here's a good, short artcile from Raganwald on the trade-off between intuitiveness and programming languagge expressiveness. Most of the article is a few quotes. The meat is at the bottom. Is Ruby's for loop an improvement over Java? By... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 1:54 PM
HQ9+
Here is proof positive that the utility of a domain specific language depends on the domain.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 28, 2007 9:47 AM
Domain Specific Languages
Recently, I've been designing a domain specific language for Kynetx, the start-up I'm working on. When you tell someone you're designing a language, the usual reaction is incredulity. "Why would you design your own language?!?!" they say. I'm here... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 2, 2007 10:24 AM
An Accidental Simula User
Luca Cardelli is one of the big guns in programming language theory--consistently producing interesting and important results over several decades. His paper (with Peter Wagner) "On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism" which I read as a graduate student... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 23, 2007 3:46 PM
Java Desktop Developments
This week's show on the Technometria podcast is an interview with Chet Hasse. Chet works for Sun Microsystems in the Java Desktop group. We talk about upcoming features in the Java desktop and Sun's applet strategy. Chet's new book... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 14, 2007 9:15 AM
Fast, Interpreted XML Parsing
I'm in a presentation on a paper called A High-Performance Interpretive Approach to Schema-Directed Parsing (here's the PDF for the paper). Last year these authors presented a fast, validating XML parser (called Screamer) that outperforms Xerces (validating) and Expat... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 10, 2007 12:11 PM
Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk
If you're interested in programming language design, this history of Smalltalk by Alan Kay from the 1993 HOPL conference is worth reading. That was the second HOPL conference. The third is happening June 9-10 in San Diego. I'd go... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 17, 2007 8:51 AM
Miguel on Mono
In this week's Technometria podcast, Scott, Ben, and I talk with Miguel de Icaza, the founder and force behind the Mono project. We had a great discussion about the project's history, purpose, and architecture. We also got into some... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 10, 2007 11:42 AM
Applied Web Heresies: ETech 2007
I really wanted to go to Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software by Amy Jo Kim, but my inner geek won out and I went to Applied Web Heresies with Avi Bryant (slides). I... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 26, 2007 2:56 PM
John Backus Dies
John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN, BNF, and winner of the 1977 Turing Award (read his lecture) has passed away at 82. I tell my CS330 students about Backus and the development of FORTRAN every semester when we discuss... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 21, 2007 10:13 AM
January CTO Breakfast Report
We talked about the recent SHA-1 hack and the MD5 exploits that are available. Lockcrack (a password cracking program) apparently has a table of pre computed hashes now installed that make cracking many hashes a job of just a... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 25, 2007 10:24 AM
Composition as a Programming Activity
When I started programming, you had four choices on the IBM 370 system that the University of Idaho made available to students: Cobol, Fortran, Basic, and APL. I learned Fortran and Basic, avoided Cobol because it was for "business",... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 21, 2006 9:50 AM
Haskell vs. Java Smackdown
Defmacro.org has a small example of Haskell's expressive power and the same code written in Java. Both take five lines of code to "[go] through a parse tree of Haskell source code, locates every reference to an identifier that... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 18, 2006 4:00 PM
CTO Breakfast Report for October
I posted a piece on why mobile data centers matter at Between the Lines. My thoughts were in response to the most recent Gillmor Gang where Sun's new mobile data centers were discussed. Another interesting tidbit from that show... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 26, 2006 9:49 PM
Emacs and Ruby
Jao at Programming Musings linked my my post on tools with a nice article on using powerful editors. Jao's post included a link to a screencast on using emacs and ruby by Marshall Vandegrift. I've been using emacs for... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 23, 2006 3:15 PM
My HTML Mode for Emacs
Some people have asked what HTML mode I finally settled on. I'm using a customized version of Daniel Pfeiffer's adaptation of James Clark's sgml-mode. Yeah, there's lots of SGML stuff that I don't use, but it has a set... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 20, 2006 2:18 PM
On The Virtues of Functional Abstraction
Joel Spolsky, who I interviewed for IT Conversations last year is talking about virtues of first-class functions and their positive impact on functional abstraction. Ok. I hope you're convinced, by now, that programming languages with first-class functions let you... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 7, 2006 2:32 PM
Obsoleting Grades
I recieved an anonymous hate email this morning that read in total: You made my grade obsolete. Ugh...You suck like no other This intrigued me. I'm not sure what it means to "obsolete" a grade. Is this a student,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 12, 2006 1:09 PM
Effective Scheming
I received an email from a former student who's caught the Scheme bug. He says: I took 330 from you last year and I really enjoy coding in Scheme. I do any class project I can in Scheme --... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 20, 2006 3:23 PM
Introduction to JavaScript (ETech 2006 Tutorial)
This morning I'm in the A (Re-)Introduction to JavaScript tutorial taught be Simon Willison. Simon recommends Javascript: The Definative Guide by David Flanagan as one of the few Javascript references that's worthwhile. He hasn't found a good reference on... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 6, 2006 9:51 AM
Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?
Alan Kay(click to enlarge) Alan Kay's title slide, up during the intro says Is the Best Way to Predict the Future to {Invent,Prevent} It? with the {Invent,Prevent} alternating between each other. He jokes that this afternoon's talk can be summed... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 23, 2006 10:36 PM
LISP Ecosystems
I criticized Allegro yesterday at Between the Lines for a business model that sells programming language development environments like they were enterprise software. Programming languages and their development environments are free in the 21st century--at least that's how most... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 10, 2006 7:41 AM
Who Knew?
Who knew that Peter Coffee was a closet LISP junky? First he published this piece on "exotic" languages that I commented on at Between the Lines and then yesterday, he put out an article entitled LISP Deserves a Fresh... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 8, 2006 1:38 PM
JavaSchools, Scheme, and Sin
Joel Spolsky has a great essay on the perils of JavaSchools, those CS programs that adopt Java (or .Net, to be fair) because it is easy for students to learn. In it, he sings the praises of learning Scheme... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 8, 2006 10:49 AM
Time to Learn LISP
I just posted an article at Between the Lines called Time to learn LISP, a riff on Peter Coffee's recent piece on LISP and other "exotic" languages and techniques going mainstream.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 6, 2006 2:33 PM
My First Web Server
Jeremy Zawodny's reminiscing about his first Web server and got me thinking about my first server. In 1993, I left the University of Idaho's CS department to take a position at BYU. I was a formal methods researcher and... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 3, 2006 7:28 PM
Preparing Students to be Influential
In The University: An Owner's Manual, Henry Rosovsky discusses the varied "owners" of a university: students, parents, alumni, employers, and faculty. Similarly, academic departments are always torn between who their customers are. This always affects faculty discussions about almost... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 9, 2005 10:37 AM
Achieving Ubiquity With an Identity Metasystem
Brett McDowall, who gave a presentation on Liberty at IIW2005, has started a blog. At IIW2005, he said "the world belongs to those who show up" and his blog is an effort to "show up" in the blogosphere. Brett... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 2, 2005 6:17 PM
Ways of Thinking, Ways of Doing
In a recent column, Jon Udell says "much of what seems to be modern innovation is, in fact, rediscovery of ... Lisp and Smalltalk." He goes on later to say: If existing tools can do more than we realize,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 12, 2005 9:49 AM
Overloading: Syntactic Heroin
ACM Queue has an article entitled Syntactic Heroin which says that user-defined overloading (ad hoc polymorphism) is a drug. User-defined overloading is a drug. At first, it gives you a quick, feel-good fix. No sense in cluttering up code... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 10, 2005 10:28 AM
CTO Breakfast Report
Today's CTO Breakfast was well attended and, as usual, there were a few new faces and some great conversation. Some of the topics we discused include: The state of the UTOPIA network build-out in Orem Programming languages, natural languages,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 27, 2005 2:28 PM
The Continuing March of Dynamic Languages
Oracle announced Zend yesterday, an integration of PHP with their Oracle 10g database. If I were starting a small Web-based business today, I wouldn't even consider Java. I'd stick with a dynamic language like PHP, Perl, Python, or (gasp)... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 19, 2005 3:26 PM
Building Interactive Web Programs with Continuations
Supposed I asked you to build a program to grab the current exchange rates from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York (FRBNY) in XML, prompt the user for the currency to exchange dollars for, then prompt the user... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 16, 2005 3:06 PM
Amazon Web Services in Scheme
Initial screen for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Scheme Earlier, I showed my Programming Languages class how XML and s-expressions were related and how to use the SSAX parser to parse XML into s-expressions. I wanted to do something... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 4, 2005 4:26 PM
Java vs. C++
Java is preferable to C++ in exactly the same way that driving a 1994 Chevy Impala is preferable to driving a 1978 Ford LTD. Update: Here's some pictures to help you with the visualization. 1978 Ford LTD 1994 Chevy... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 3, 2005 7:46 PM
XML and Scheme
I put together a small demonstration of how knowing programming language concepts and Scheme can help you understand XML. My point isn't to show how to do XML inside Scheme or to say Scheme is better than XML. My... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 26, 2005 9:04 PM
OOP Is Better In Theory Than Practice
In a DevX, Richard Mansfield argues that OOP is better in theory than practice. Here's the intro to the article: Think object-orient programming (OOP) is the only way to go? You poor, misguided soul. Richard Mansfield contends that OOP... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 19, 2005 3:02 PM
Getting Ready for Next Semester
I spent the morning getting the Web site and course projects ready for Concepts of Programming Languages next semester. I love that class. This afternoon, I'm headed up to the Capitol for a meeting.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 28, 2004 1:36 PM
Linda and Service Oriented Architectures
The September issue of Dr. Dobbs has an article (PDF) by Ron Bjornson and Andrew Sherman of TurboWorx on the use of Linda in Grid computing. Ron and Andrew both got their PhDs from Yale where Linda was developed... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 25, 2004 4:30 PM
OSCON 2004: Paul Graham on Great Hackers
What follows are some thoughts from Paul Graham's talk last night. Variation in wealth is a sign of variation in productivity. Low-tech societies don't have variations in connectivity. We need to understand especially productive people. How do you recognize them?... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 28, 2004 11:32 AM
VisaProcess, Meta-Mail, and Virtual Networks of Demand
On a note related to the article on Alan Kaye I just posted, I just was reading Esther Dyson's abstract for this month's Release 1.0 on what the spreadsheet did for data, freeing users from models built on the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 13, 2004 11:59 AM
Scaling Programming Projects
Patrick Logan comments on my post about the lack of modern compiled languages for optimized performance by pointing to an excellent article by Dan Friedman and asks "Why not take the road less travelled?" The Friedman article contains a... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 2, 2004 9:52 AM
VMs as the Dominant Software Platform
Jon Udell describes how virtual machines have become the dominant software platform and some of its implications: At that point something clicked in my head, and I proposed a software taxonomy based entirely on virtual machines -- the VB runtime,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 1, 2004 7:41 AM
How Microsoft Lost the API War
Joel Spolsky has a great article (albeit long) on How Microsoft Lost the API War that along the way talks about programming languages, memory management, and the Web. Even if you're not particularly interested in Microsoft or programming for... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 17, 2004 7:57 AM
W3C Publishes First Draft of WS-CDL
The World Wide Web Consortium has published the first draft of the Web services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL). WS-CDL is targeted at coordinating interactions among Web services and their users. WS-CDL promises to be a necessary component for BPEL... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 28, 2004 5:36 PM
Visual Programming in SOA
Sean McGrath has a tough time seeing the case for visual programming languages in a predominantly imperative programming model. I think he's on the mark. But Sean thinks SOA will change this. This is already true, to some extent.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 25, 2004 10:41 AM
The Language of Types
Jon Udell is talking about types and languages. Having taught undergraduate programming language concept courses and graduate level programming language theory courses, I know that just the terminology can mess a lot of people up. Here's some definitions: Strongly... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 3, 2004 3:39 PM
Hilbert No. 16 Partially Solved
In 1900, Professor David Hilbert gave a talk entitled "The Future of Mathematics" before the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris (See Bulliten of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 8, 1902). In his talk Hilbert listed 23 problems... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 28, 2003 10:34 AM
The Essence of XML
Phil Wadler is one of Computer Science's deepest thinkers in the area of programming language theory. I've been a longtime fan of his work. He presented a paper at this year's POPL (Principals of Programming Languages) entitled The Essence... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 15, 2003 11:49 AM
CS 462 Class Information
I'm starting to get some questions from people who are interested in taking CS462 in the Fall. CS462 is a class on large scale distributed systems that I teach at Brigham Young University. Here's information on when the course... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 18, 2003 2:24 PM
Relax NG
I wanted to go to Mike Fitzgerald's talk on Relax NG last week at the OReilly Open Source Convention, but it was opposite Andy McKay's Plone talk and I needed to go to that for other reasons. I did... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 17, 2003 11:39 AM
Sonic ESB: Programmable integration
The pressure to integrate disparate systems across the enterprise is steadily increasing, but establishing connections between systems, even those designed for integration, remains a daunting task. Traditionally, enterprises connected systems using point-to-point links and custom code. More recently, integration... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 11, 2003 9:16 AM
Final Project
A few items of note for the final project. You should be in the same group you were in for the first project. If that's not possible, let Grant know as soon as possible. By tomorrow evening at midnight... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 29, 2003 10:39 PM
Declarative AWK
Zia responded to my my article on XSLT and declarative programming languages by pointing out that AWK has some declarative features. This is true. An AWK program is structured as a preamble, followed by a collection of rules, followed... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 19, 2003 4:21 PM
Language Doesn't Matter: Its All About Design
Grady Booch has been around the programming language scene for a long time (I read some of his papers in grad school). He's now Chief Scientist at Rational Software. Grady was interviewed in February issue of .NET Magazine. There's... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 15, 2003 8:56 AM
Dynamic Typing
In my CS330 class today, we were discussing dynamic typing and the define-datatype declaration. Most of the students have never worked in a dynamically typed language like Scheme before, so there's plenty of opportunity for this topic to come... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 9, 2003 4:42 PM
Recursion Patterns
We talked about recursion in Concepts of Programming Languages and I mentioned that Lecture 8 should more properly be entitled "Recursion Design Patterns." I think it would be interesting to write them up using the GoF templates. For reference,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 8, 2003 6:32 PM
Some Things to Know
Welcome to CS330. If you've made it here, you've found where I'll be posting occasional thoughts on the class. Feel free to take a few minutes to read the blog this is part of. Here are a few places... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 29, 2003 11:00 PM
Concepts of Programming Languages
Wednesday I start teaching a course for BYU called Concepts of Programming Languages. This is a course I designed 10 years ago when I first went to BYU and its still taught in much the same manner. The text,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 28, 2003 5:26 PM
Representations and URIs
Jon Udell references a discussion that has been raging on what a URI represents. Jon quotes Tim Berner-Lee who summarizes it, succinctly, as follows: What does "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ 0679600108/qid=1027958807/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/103-4363499-9407855" identify? A whale "Moby Dick or the Whale" by Herman Melville... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 27, 2003 10:28 PM
Web Services in California Government
Michael Clark, who works for California's Department of Social Services wrote me with a wonderful story of using XML to link multiple government systems. I quote him here with permission: XML is one of those concept technologies that I find... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 29, 2002 9:04 AM
Unintended Consequences
One of my favorite sayings is that I love when good things happen and I don't have to be involved. I don't think its original with me, its an expression that anyone who manages anything has thought at one time... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 14, 2002 9:05 PM
Amazon Web Services and REST
A few days ago, Amazon announced their web services program. Unfortunately, I had two days without much time to play. Tonight I finally had a little time. Amazon's progam supports both a SOAP/RPC model and a RESTful model. Using the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 18, 2002 11:51 PM
XLANG and WSFL: Syntactic Arsenic
An Infoworld article by Jon Udell says: XML is a lousy syntax for programming languages, and BizTalk developers have longed for something more programmer-friendly. For XLANG users, help is on the way, according to Dave Wascha, lead product manager for... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 12, 2002 2:44 PM